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The 100-plus Holstein dairy cows at the University of Delaware’s Newark Farm perform a very important function – they provide hands-on experiences and research opportunities for undergrad and grad students. Research options run the gamut, as the dairy nutrition research program is closely linked with studies on silage and forage production.

But some would argue that these Holsteins serve an even greater good – supplying the first and most important ingredient in UDairy Creamery ice cream.

The process of getting that milk starts at 4:30 a.m. each morning, when first milking begins. It takes three hours to milk the cows and pump the milk into a cooling tank chilled to 38 degrees. Second milking starts at 3:30 p.m. and runs until 6:30 p.m. By the end of each day, the UD Dairy has produced 8,000 pounds of milk, according to dairy manager Richard Morris.

The portion of milk that’s earmarked for the creamery is delivered to Cumberland Dairy, in Bridgeton, N.J., where it’s homogenized and pasteurized, then made into ice cream base. The rest of the milk is picked up every two days by Hy-Point Dairy, which homogenizes and pasteurizes it for use in UD dining halls, as well as some New Castle County public school cafeterias. The remaining milk is sold to a dairy cooperative.

Although Cumberland makes the creamery’s ice cream base, the actual ice cream is made on site at UD by student employees, one small batch at a time. All those small batches add up. During peak season, the creamery produces almost eight tons of ice cream each week.

On a recent morning, Liz Abraham, an employee who just graduated from UD, was saying her teary-eyed goodbyes to Litvinas as rising sophomore Jason Morris made up a batch of “Delaware River Mud Pie.”

Morris has been working at the creamery since high school but he’s been around UD’s dairy cows all his life – he’s Richard Morris’ son. “When I was little, I lived on a house on the UD Farm,” he says. “I’m majoring in agribusiness now, and I’m learning a lot at the creamery.”

As he deftly mixes crushed cookies and fudge into vanilla ice cream, without so much as a splotch of chocolate splattering his apron, it’s clear that Morris has picked up the ins and outs of ice cream making.

“When I first started working here, I would be covered in fudge or caramel or marshmallow fluff after making a batch,” he says.

But he and the other student employees are learning more than just how to stay neat while working with humongous vats of fudge. Litvinas hires three interns each academic year to work as student managers. Together these managers and their 30 student employees develop and implement the creamery’s business plans.

They arrange for the sale of UDairy ice cream in bulk and at campus events. They order chocolate sandwich cookies and all the other mix-in ingredients, oversee special events, think up contests and other promotions. And best of all, experiment to come up with new ice cream flavors.

“The students have a lot of freedom to craft new ice cream flavors and test them out,” says Litvinas.

Currently, the most popular flavor is “Delaware River Mud Pie,” which features vanilla and chocolate cookie ice cream with fudge swirls. The No. 2 flavor is “1923,” a special flavor commemorating UD’s 90 years of study abroad. “1923” starts with French vanilla (France was the first destination for UD study abroad), complemented by bittersweet chocolate chunks and salted caramel swirls.

Creamery ice cream is sold by the scoop or carton at the storefront location on South College Avenue, as well as by the pint at the UD Barnes and Noble Bookstore and the Marriott Courtyard hotel on campus. And now it is available from an ice cream truck that will periodically visit UD’s Lewes and Georgetown campuses, as well as special events, including the Delaware State Fair.

Or, you could get your ice cream fix by going back to school. A rotating selection of creamery flavors is available in UD’s dining halls. Each week during the school year, students on the meal plan gobble up more than 1,000 pounds of ice cream.

National Dairy Month officially ends at midnight on July 1. Merely four and one-half hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, the University of Delaware Dairy staff will be right back where they’ve always been — hard at work milking the herd.

Cows are milked twice a day on the dairy farm, with a morning milking running from 4:30-7:30 a.m. and an afternoon milking taking place from 3:30-6 p.m.

Richard Morris, dairy manager, explained that the milking is done by one of the farm’s two full-time employees. Ron Gouge, farm assistant, usually handles the milking, working five days a week and milking every other weekend, while Mark Baker, farm assistant, is responsible for feeding the cows, cleaning the barns and helping out with maintenance.

Student workers also help out with the milking of the cows and when asked how the student employees have been about getting up at 4:30 in the morning, Morris is quick to say that they have been great.

“The past few years we’ve actually had pretty good luck of getting students that would do the morning milking,” said Morris. “Usually we would just do the morning milking ourselves, and then afternoons we would always have help, but I’d say the past two years we’ve had quite a few morning milkers.”

With the two milkings, the UD Dairy produces 85 pounds of milk per day, or between 9-10 gallons per cow, which is up significantly since Morris began working on the farm 26 years ago when the dairy produced around 6-7 gallons of milk per cow per day.

Once the milk is produced on the farm, it is put in a cooling tank, chilled at 38 degrees and then picked up every two days by Hy-Point Dairy.

Hy-Point then pasteurizes and homogenizes the milk to make it suitable for drinking, and some of it is sent back for use in the UD dining halls. Additional UD-produced milk is used in cafeterias at public schools in New Castle County.

Hy-Point also sends a portion of the milk it receives from the UD Dairy to Cumberland Farms in New Jersey, where it provides the base mix for the ice cream served at the UDairy Creamery.

“A lot of time and work is put into helping them do their research,” said Morris. “Usually when we’re assisting with their research, they have a graduate student assigned to that project, so we work a lot with the graduate student.”

Morris explained that helping with the research involves determining which cows the researchers will use, getting the research equipment set up and letting the researchers know what feed they need to use for the study.

Kung said that the dairy staff has been “successful in operating as a normal dairy farm and addressing the needs for research. On a day-to-day basis, Richard Morris, Ron Gouge and Mark Baker are an outstanding group of individuals that keep animal health and production at their best. Whether its 10 degrees or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, these individuals are constantly looking out for the animals.”

During his 26 years working on the UD farm, Morris has seen a lot of changes but perhaps none more so than in 2007 when the farm was upgraded with new equipment including a new milking parlor, a state-of-the-art manure processing barn which includes a 1.2 million gallon manure tank.

The milking parlor, which opened in 2008, has helped to cut the milking time in half, and provided better lighting, ventilation, and comfort for both the employees and the cows.

Gressley explained that one of the improvements to the parlor involves the cows wearing transponders around their necks in order for a computer to identify what particular cow is in which stall in the parlor. The computer can then record how much milk each cow produces, so the milk production is known for each individual cow during every milking.

“The big thing you can tell is who are your really good cows and who are your not so great cows,” said Gressley.

With regards to cow comfort, Gressley explained, “We have very comfortable stalls, and the reason we have very comfortable stalls is they are filled with sand, really the best option that’s out there. The cows really like that — it gives them mobility to get up and down, and it’s comfortable for them.”

The sand is also able to be recycled, thanks to the new manure processing system which separates the solid and liquid manure from the sand, allowing the sand to be re-used for the cow bedding, cutting down on costs.

As far as the manure improvements go, it has benefitted both the dairy and the UD farm in general. The solid manure produced on the farm is hauled away by a local farmer, while the liquid manure is stored and then applied to the UD cropland in a timely manner, providing most of the fertilizer necessary to grow crops.

The manure processing barn is also equipped with a 9.6 kilowatt solar panel system, 44 solar panels in all, which helps augment the electricity cost when the processing barn is being used, producing an estimated 11,000 kilowatt hours per year.